Science Says Coffee May Help You Live Longer

Love coffee? Guess what – it loves you back. Two new studies indicate that coffee may increase your longevity – lowering your risk of dying from a variety of factors.

Drink that in.

One study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at the association between coffee consumption and mortality in 10 European countries. The researchers, led by Marc Gunter, reader in cancer epidemiology and prevention at the Imperial College School of Public Health in London, evaluated the hazard ratios and biomarkers of 521,330 participants enrolled in EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition), making it, CNN notes, “the largest study to date on coffee and mortality.”

It found that people who drink the most coffee (three or more cups a day) had a significantly lower risk of death from any cause than those who do not drink coffee at all. The study further indicated that coffee consumption reduced the risk for death from digestive disease in both men and women as well as circulatory and cerebrovascular diseases in women (though it showed a slight uptick in the risk of death from ovarian cancer).

Another study, funded by the National Cancer Institute and published in the same journal, examined association between coffee and mortality specifically in nonwhite populations, where there had been a dearth of information. The researchers looked at a population of 185,855 African Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Latinos and whites, ranging in age from 45 to 75 years old at the outset of the study, assessing their total deaths and deaths from specific causes between 1993 and 2012.

They found that people the association between higher consumption of coffee and lower risk for death overall held for African Americans, Japanese Americans, Latinos and whites. The association, however, in Native Hawaiians was not determined to be statistically significant. Interestingly, the results were true of both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee.

What’s more, members of these populations who drink coffee also have a lower risk for deaths specifically from heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease, compared to non-coffee-drinkers, the study concluded.